Is Apple testing Siri for the Apple iPhone 4?

The Apple iPhone 4S is what we would call an incremental upgrade over the Apple iPhone 4. An upgraded 8MP camera is on board while a dual-core A5 processor replaces the A4 found on the previous version of the phone. And of course, Siri is ready to assist Apple iPhone 4S users. Of those changes, Apple iPhone 4 owners can do nothing about the first two things except spend the money to buy the new model of the device. There is something that can be done about being Siri-less on the iPhone 4.

In the middle of last month, we showed you a video of the results of Steve Troughton-Smith's efforts of porting Siri over to the Apple iPhone 4. Smith had been missing one key file which he found in the Apple iPhone 4S and with it, he was able to successfully bring Siri over to the older model and warm the hearts of millions of iPhone 4 owners who could not upgrade to the new model. The one drawback is that because Smith was using files that don't belong to him, he was planning on waiting for a jailbreak solution to the iPhone 4S before releasing his notes. But that might be a moot issue right now because it appears that Apple itself is working on porting over Siri to the Apple iPhone 4.

According to a source for JailBreaqkNation that is close to the guys at Cupertino, Apple staff was given an iPhone 4 using a test version of iOS 5 with Siri aboard. After the test, the special version of iOS 5 was wiped from the phones so that it could not be seen by the prying eyes of the public. It is unknown whether or not Apple is in a rush to port over the personal assistant since it remains a reason for iPhone buyers to pay more for the newer iteration of the device. Additionally, an hours long server outage that kept Siri silent throughout the country could have spooked Apple into keeping the feature limited to the Apple iPhone 4S. After all, if the Apple servers were overloaded now, what would happen if Apple iPhone 4 users started asking Siri questions?

If it was as simple as dragging and dropping files to make Siri work flawlessly on the iPhone 4, thousands upon thousands of people would have already done it. I suspect that major files and attributes had to be either edited, scaled back or removed entirely. Either in spite of this or because of this, Smith's port of Siri was not without it's problems. If Siri was released like that on the iPhone 4 there would be outrage about it and Apple's reputation of having polished end products would likely be dented as it was very laggy.

Getting it to function is one thing - getting it to function at Apple's obsessive compulsively perfect standards is another thing entirely. Some features may be missing in the version destined to the A4 because of that.

and they only had to make it 230% more availible than the i4 was at launch to do that.
Instead of looking at 1 number to fit your fancy, look at the whole picture. The i4's launch numbers were fantastic as it was on just 1 US carrier and a hand full of other countries.
The i4s BARELY beat it on 3 carriers + the rest of the world.

Taken in the context, the i4s is a FAILURE compared to the i4 as it had much FEWER sales per carrier, per country.

Indeed we sold our intial 30 Iphone 4s I got delivered in stock in my store. The second 15 phones in the order came in and we only sold 3 in the next 3 days,its always the usual mindless saps that salivate the money for apple at the start.

That's because it had the "shiny new product" smell about it. The differences are so little that the 4S is already a tough sell to people who don't care about the minimal performance increase the A5 gives you. It will be much more difficult if Siri is available in any capacity on the iPhone 4. At that point, you're paying more than double the price for an improved camera, something the iPhone 4 is already very good at.

just because 4 million people act like mindless zombies doesn't make it anymore reason for any one with sense to buy an iphone 4s.

Funny enough seeing as we have now only being selling the iphone 4s for a week in the shop I work in we now have 7 iphone 4s returned for 'doa' compaints. 2 with complaints of awful battery life,3 with poor reception and dropping calls (touchy subject as these people already were very angry over the iphone 4 behaving this way......some idiots never learn though) and the other two with faulty mic and freezing respectively. Considering we sold our 30 phones we got in the delivery its about a 25% faulty return rate so far

Apple made changes to Siri before baking it into the OS. The Siri on the App Store is not equal to the one you will see on the 4S. Early ports of Siri on the iPhone 4 tell this much as it is not a fluid experience. It's extremely laggy and unresponsive and the accuracy is way out of wack.

they made changes that force it to have to run through apple servers instead of just being an app. Now apple has a record of every thing that you ask/tell siri to do.
Just wait.. you thought antennagate/tracking-gate was bad... lets see what apple does with all of this info you are voluntarily feeding it.

Just for the record remix I am not an iFanboy. I don't own an iPhone 4S... just speaking by logic (that may be flawed as I don't have a 4S) :P I just like tech so I try to speak as neutral as possible.

That was what I meant by baking it into the OS. The main difference between being 3rd party and being adopted by Apple means that everything now runs through Apple. The possibilities of what Apple can and probably will do somewhat scares me. Does that mean that anyone who jokingly asks Siri "find me the nearest whore house" or "where do i hide a dead body" will be questioned? :P

And I thought Google's "ads that pertain to you, your locations and interests" freaked me out...

More than one reason for that way of thinking, but the most important thing comes to mind - who in their right mind would buy a 4S if it's largest selling feature - Siri - was on the much cheaper and in real life usage just as fast iPhone 4. As anti-Apple as I am, I've yet to see an iPhone 4 lag in any capacity, so the A5 kind of seems like overkill.

Full-fat Siri on the iPhone 4 would be a rather stupid idea because then the only tangible upgrade the 4S has is a better camera.

The second most obvious reason is change the way it interacts with the server, so they don't explode when (and if) Siri gets on iPhone 4 and millions upon million of people start using it.

Also, if it wasn't designed around the A5, I don't think Smith would have needed a jailbroken 4S to complete the porting. Some files and functions probably needed to be modified or removed to make it work smoothly on the A4.

Probably should have specified :) I don't mean that it'll be crippled beyond usage - just not as baked into the OS as it is on the 4S. More like the app *was*.

I have actually seen articles where they say they don't really quite know if there are hardware limitations to Siri. I don't know if it would necessarily be that much slower on the iphone 4 than the iphone 4S. While the iphone 4S does have a dual-core processor, it is only clocked at 800 mhz and I believe it has the same 512 MB of RAM as the iphone 4. So, while it is faster than the iphone 4, it in actuality isn't by much. So in my opinion, I would say that Siri is a marketing ploy by Apple to get people to buy the 4S because otherwise there is marginal differences.

From the articles I have read about Siri, Troughton-Smith's efforts (and Apple's test run) to port Siri to the iPhone 4, I suspect the role of the servers is probably two-fold: 1.) To catalog location and query data (aka ad revenue generators) and 2.) To determine that only authorized (iPhone 4S at present) devices are running Siri.

If you see Siri ported to the iPhone 4 by Apple, location and query data cataloging will be the driving motivation. In that circumstance, $ will be at stake, and Apple will adequately capacitize the necessary server resources. Remember, Siri is technically in beta release on the iPhone 4S....

@clevername - Meh. Lag could be due to inadequate server capacitization. Ever notice delay in loading PA when a popular event is being covered? Since the Apple servers supporting Siri functionality have been down, there has been infinite lag.... Lol!

He was referring to googles voice actions and interactions thereof. When it comes to voice interactivity, sorry to say but siri is more advanced. I know taco catches a lot of flak here buy for once this isn't an Android bashing iPhone blinded comment. Siri just happens to be better... For now.

Highly doubtful. If Siri is trying to use a homegrown alternative to Google for web searches, rots of ruck to Apple. Maybe that is the reason for the Siri servers to be down?! If so, I don't expect Siri to have any adverse impact on Google's web search business.

It uses different data bases including being able to do a google search. However for a lot of the stuff it does bypass google. Furthermore the user doesn't even think about how it happens. Apple's app business is also hearting google because a lot of searchers are now done inside of an app.

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